Los Angeles Master Chorale
Program
Heinrich Schütz Musikalische Exequien
I.
Concert in Form einer teutschen Begräbnis-Missa
Concerto in the form of a German Funeral Mass
II.
Motette: Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe
Motet: Lord, if I only have you
III.
Canticum B. Simeonis: Herr, nun lässest du deinen Diener in Frieden fahren
The Song of Simeon: Lord, let your servant now depart in peace
Peter Sellars
Lisa Edwards
Eva Lymenstull
Grant Gershon
Peter Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists. He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Opéra National de Paris, Salzburg Festival, and San Francisco Opera among others. Earlier this year, Sellars created a staging of the Roman de Fauvel at the Théâtre du Châtelet in collaboration with musicologist and founder of the Sequentia Ensemble, Benjamin Bagby. Also, in 2022 he staged composer Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) for the Park Avenue Armory. A revival of Sellars’ acclaimed production of Tristan und Isolde, with videography by artist Bill Viola, will be seen at the Paris Opera early in 2023. Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. He is recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize and named Artist of the Year by Musical America. In 2021 he was honored with the EBU-IMZ Lifetime Achievement Award for his body of opera video recordings.
Lisa Edwards is a widely sought after pianist, keyboard collaborator and teacher, based in Los Angeles. She is the pianist/music assistant for Los Angeles Master Chorale, under the direction of Grant Gershon, the Kiki and David Gindler Artistic Director. As a project collaborator, Ms. Edwards is frequently involved with preparing productions with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Such projects include John Adams' operas El Nino, Nixon in China, A Flowering Tree, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary, as well as Schumann's Oas Paradies und die Peri, Stravinsky's Persephone, Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms, Shostakovich's Prologue to Orango, and Bernstein's Mass, among others. Performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella series include, War of the Worlds by Annie Gosfteld, and Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar. Other performances include, Steve Reich's You Are (Variations) at Avery Fischer Hall, Stravinsky's Les Noces at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Ian Krause's Lorca, Child ofthe Moon at the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts. In July 2023 she performed at the Salzburg Festival with Los Angeles Master Chorale in Sofia Gubaidulina's Sonnengesang and Music to Accompany a Departure, the Chorale's acclaimed staging of Heinrich Schutz's Musikalische Exequien, directed by Peter Sellars. On disc, she can be heard on two Nonesuch recordings of Steve Reich's music, You Are (Variations) and Daniel Variations, and Eric Whitacre's The Sacred Veil.
Eva Lymenstull enjoys a varied career playing baroque and modern cello and viola da gamba across the US and Canada. She has performed as concerto soloist and principal cellist with the Lyra Baroque Orchestra, guest principal cellist of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, and Musica Angelica, and has appeared with Tafelmusik, Tesserae, Bach Collegium San Diego, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. A Voices of Music Bach Competition winner, she plays at the Carmel Bach Festival and on concert series across North America. Recent recordings can be heard on the Brilliant Classics and Violet Ear labels. Eva teaches baroque cello and viol as a guest artist in residence at the University of Michigan, and has given masterclasses at Michigan State, McGill, and USC. She holds degrees from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Rice University, and University of Michigan, and a doctorate in historical performance practice from Case Western Reserve University.
Hailed for his adventurous and bold artistic leadership, Grant Gershon, Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director, recently celebrated his 20th anniversary season with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, which he transformed into the "best-by-far major chorus in America” (Los Angeles Times).
In 2022, Grant and the Chorale received the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance followed by Chorus America’s 2022 Korn Founders Award for his career-spanning leadership in the field of choral music.
In July of 2023, Grant and the Chorale made a triumphant return to the famed Salzburg Festival with Music to Accompany a Departure (Heinrich Schütz), directed by Peter Sellars. About the performances, the Süddeutsche Zeitung declared “Everything is warmth, radiance and emotion,” and the Augsburger Allgemein wrote “And what a choir! Flawless intonation…light-flooded transparency and an almost unearthly tonal richness.” In the 2023-24 season, the Chorale will tour this groundbreaking production to San Francisco, Chicago, and Toronto.
Grant enjoys a close working relationship with many of the leading composers of our time, including his long-time collaborator, John Adams. Grant led the world premiere performances of Adams’ opera Girls of the Golden West with the San Francisco Opera, and his theater piece I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky for the Lincoln Center Festival. Adams wrote his two-piano masterpiece Hallelujah Junction specifically for Grant, who premiered it with fellow pianist Gloria Cheng. Grant also led the world premieres of two operas that have quickly become classics: Daniel Catán’s Il Postino (LA Opera) and Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath (Minnesota Opera). With the Chorale, he has led countless premieres of works by composers including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steve Reich, Tania Léon, Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Louis Andriessen, among many others.
In addition to the Grammy Award-winning (Best Choral Performance) Mahler: Symphony No. 8 with Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A Philharmonic, Grant’s discography with the Chorale includes recordings of music by Nico Muhly, Henrik Gorecki, David Lang, and Steve Reich for Decca, Nonesuch, and Cantaloupe Records. He has also led the Chorale in performances for several major motion pictures soundtracks, including, at the request of John Williams, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. On DVD he has conducted Gianni Schicchi and Il Postino with LA Opera for Sony Classical.
As resident conductor of LA Opera, Grant led the acclaimed West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha. He made his company debut with a rapturously received run of La Traviata in 2009, and subsequently conducted productions of Il Postino, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Florencia en el Amazonas, Wonderful Town, The Tales of Hoffmann, and The Pearl Fishers, among others. Grant has frequently led opera performances with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.
In New York, Grant has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and at the historic Trinity Wall Street. He has been featured on the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center and the Making Music series at Zankel Hall. Other major appearances include performances at the Ravinia, Aspen, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Salzburg, and Vienna festivals; Teatro Colon in Buenos Aries, the Barbican in London, and the Paris Philharmonie. He has had the honor of working closely with numerous legendary conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Gustavo Dudamel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, and his mentor, Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Reimagining the Requiem
by THOMAS MAY
On February 4, 1636, the funeral services of Prince Heinrich II Posthumus of Reuss took place with musical accompaniment composed by his younger friend (and namesake) Heinrich Schütz. Prince Heinrich, an admired and enlightened ruler during an era of almost unimaginable devastation in Central Europe, had prepared meticulously for his own death.
Nascent Lutheran tradition allowed the personal selection of religious texts for one’s funeral, but the scope of Prince Heinrich’s arrangements was unprecedented. At least a year before his death, he secretly ordered a copper coffin to be made, on which an array of 25 quotations—sourced from the Bible together with various church hymns—was inscribed on all sides, surrounded by exquisite painted decorations. This collection of texts also served as the basis for the Musikalische Exequien that Schütz was commissioned to compose—a sonic “translation” and amplification of the message embodied by this unique sarcophagus and an integral part of the process of saying goodbye.
“Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have experienced the trauma of losing loved ones and oftentimes not being able to be there with them during their last weeks, days, hours,” says Grant Gershon, Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. “So we saw this piece as a perfect way to explore what it means to say goodbye and what it means to have faith that the departed’s presence will still be with us.” For director Peter Sellars, the goal is “to create a gathering that could acknowledge the passing of so many people from our lives across these last two years” through music that “touches the emotional depth that we've denied ourselves.”
A well-educated humanist with a special passion for music—he liked to take part in performances at his court by singing bass—Prince Heinrich had largely managed to keep the ravages of the Thirty Years War at bay from his domain, which was centered around Gera in the heart of Germany. Schütz, born within his sovereignty in nearby Köstritz in 1585, had recently been forced by the chaos of the war to interrupt his longtime position as Kapellmeister in Dresden and to find other courts where he could continue his life as an artist.
Although the Prince commanded only a fraction of Dresden’s resources, his policies brought economic prosperity. He had earlier consulted with Schütz to improve musical life at the court and churches and seems to have developed a close friendship with the composer. Whether the commission for the Musikalische Exequien came directly from Prince Heinrich or from his widow following his death—some accounts contend that the Prince actually heard performances of the music in his final months—Schütz constructed an innovative requiem memorial that remains a landmark of music history.
In his preface to the Exequien, which he published at roughly the midpoint of his career, the composer noted that he had “brought together and set to music in one concerted work” the scriptural quotations and hymn verses engraved all around the Prince’s special coffin. The texts in question, which encompass the Old and New Testaments, convey a theological message of overcoming the bitterness of death through the consolation and hope of the promise of eternal life.
But instead of the cosmic, metaphysical journey of the departed soul mapped out by the Latin Requiem, the carefully culled German texts of the Exequien suggest something more personal and intimate—the assurance of salvation for the departed meant to provide solace to the grieving left behind on earth, in this “vale of tears.” And Schütz has found a way to express this in music that, as described by director Peter Sellars, is “quiet, sober, beautiful, tender, heartfelt, and very modest”—at a far remove from sentimentality as well as from the “histrionics” of our own time.
If that sounds familiar, it may because Brahms achieves something comparable in his early masterpiece A German Requiem, which sets a similarly bespoke juxtaposition of scriptural texts. But Schütz, the most important German predecessor of J.S. Bach, got there more than two centuries before, in a time rent by plague as well as horrific warfare, indelibly marked by tragic losses in his personal life that gave him “a very deep understanding of death as a process of living,” according to Sellars.
Conditions had altered drastically since his youthful years, early in the 17th century, when Schütz studied music in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli. “Imagine how spectacular it must have seemed when he arrived: the 360-degree, immersive sound universe of choruses amid the blazing golds and incredible mosaics of San Marco—music not as presentation, but as immersive,” Sellars observes.
Upon returning to Germany and receiving his appointment to the court in Dresden, Schütz proceeded to combine stylistic currents from Northern Europe with these Italian influences—the latter represented, above all, by the polychoral splendor of Gabrieli, but also the subtle word painting of Monteverdian madrigal.
Aspects of both inform the Musikalische Exequien, albeit on a far more modest scale in comparison with the extravagant resources called for in earlier works of Schütz. He limited himself in this funeral music to a tutti choir scored for six to eight parts (these can have more than one voice to a part), which alternates with varying configurations of soloists. From the ensemble of 24 singers performing as the choir in tonight’s performance (three or four on a part), as many as 18 take the solo parts at various points in the piece in order to convey the “sense of communal grieving and also of the sharing of personal stories” that characterizes the work, as Gershon explains.
The Musikalische Exequien comprises three parts, offering a personalized, Protestant alternative to the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. The first, which Schütz calls “Concerto in the Form of a German Funeral Mass,” is several times longer than the other two combined and corresponds to the Kyrie and Gloria movements of the traditional Latin liturgy. “Concerto” is used here in the contemporary Italian sense of a composition for voices accompanied by basso continuo (rendered in all three parts by a portative organ and viola da gamba).
The six-part choir sings the Lutheran equivalent of the Latin rite’s tripartite Kyrie plea, interspersed by settings of Biblical verses for changing groups of soloists. This pattern of alteration continues in the much longer, symmetrically constructed, 16-part section that paraphrases and entirely rewrites the Latin Gloria using verses from contemporary chorales (sung by the choir) and scriptural passages (sung by an ever-changing assortment of soloists).
After this would have followed the sermon. Part Two sets Psalm 73 (which also appears at the center of the “Gloria” section) in the manner of a motet for double choir: the exchange between each choir is a nod to what Schütz had absorbed from the polychoral style of his mentor Gabrieli during his time at San Marco.
Part Three calls for an especially unusual scoring. A five-part choir sings the Song of Simeon from the Gospel of Luke—a quintessential prayer of peaceful leave-taking—while a trio of soloists responds with other scriptural passages and represents the “blessed soul” of the departed (baritone soloist) being escorted heavenward by two seraphim (soprano soloists). Schütz ingeniously makes use of the performance space to differentiate these musical forces and to suggest “the little group gathered around the coffin, singing to the person inside, being answered by the universe,” says Sellars.
Symbolically, this setup encapsulates the message of the Musikalische Exequien—the term “exequies” deriving from the Latin word for a “train of followers.” In Schütz’s singularly moving dramaturgy, they/we are gathering, learning to accompany a departure. As Sellars puts it: “You feel there’s nobody in that coffin anymore: that being is now in the air and the sunlight and has reentered the universe in every raindrop, in every bud on every tree.”
Thomas May is the program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Los Angeles Master Chorale
Alto Tenor
Lindsay Patterson Abdou Casey Breves*
Mindy Ella Chu* Matthew Brown
Callista Hoffman-Campbell* Adam Faruqi*
Laura Smith Roethe Dermot Kiernan*
Niké St. Clair Joey Krumbein*
Ilana Summers
Bass Soprano
Scott Graff Graycen Gardner*
James Hayden* Kelci Hahn*
Luc Kleiner* Elissa Johnston*
Chung Uk Lee*. Sunmi Shin*
Ben Han-Wei Lin* Addy Sterrett*
Brett McDermid* Andrea Zomorodian*
Portative organ
Lisa Edwards
Viola da gamba
Eva Lymenstull
*soloists
For LA Master Chorale
Susie McDermid, Director of Production
Adam Noel, Production Assistant
Robert Heath, Company Manager
DANIELLE DOMINGUE SUMI
Lighting Designer
Danielle Domingue Sumi is a visual artist inspired by culture, spirituality, and humility. She is committed to promoting social wellbeing through costume design and expressive arts. Her creativity is explicated through diversity and social justice principles with an increased understanding, recognition, and response to multiethnic heritage. A graduate of Clark Atlanta University, FIDMLA and Loyola Marymount University; with degrees in both design and art psychotherapy, Danielle is treasured for ingenuity and leadership skills in theatrical, fashion, dance, and opera costume production. Danielle has created for The Fashion Institute of Design (LA), Theatre Forty, Los Angeles Opera, Music Academy of the West, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Perm Opera and Ballet, Los Angeles Master Chorale, East West Players, Japanese American Community and Culture Center, Halau Hula Moani’a’ala Anuhea, and Company One Theatre. Danielle worked as Resident Costume Designer with Nobles Theatre Collective. She is currently Costume Director with New Orleans Opera Association.
JAMES F. INGALLS
Lighting Design
James F. Ingalls made his Los Angeles Master Chorale debut with Lagrime di San Pietro, with which he has toured internationally. His work for the LA Philharmonic includes last season’s Fidelio with Deaf West Theatre and previous season’s Canata Criolla, El Niño and The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Designs for Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group include The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Price and A Parallelogram. Most recently for Peter Sellars he designed Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) (Park Avenue Armory/NYC), Oedipus Rex/Symphony of Psalms (San Francisco Symphony) and Le Roman de Fauvel (Theatre du Chatelet/Paris). Recent designs for dance include Ibsen’s House (Singapore Ballet and Charlotte Ballet), Raymonda (Dutch National Ballet) and Twyla Now! (New York City Center). Recent theatre includes Once Before I Go (Gate Theatre/Dublin) and The Seagull and Three O’Casey Comedies (Druid Theatre/Galway). He often collaborates with The Wooden Floor dancers in Santa Ana, California.